There are five basic tastes—six if you count "metallic." But there are thousands of flavors and even more when you mix and match. So how can you tell what spice arrived in your stew or what herb is in your marinade? The cooks at Stack Exchange can help.

Question:

I'd love to be able to cook well and I think a part of that is identifying flavors.

We all have different palates, but there are probably some basic techniques that can be used to figure out what the meal is made out of.

For example, there is a spicy Indian dish at a restaurant nearby that I love and it's pretty simple (chicken and rice), but I can't identify the contents of the marinade, and the owner wont tell me what it is.

So, outside of trying every spice there is, what are some tips to identify flavors?

Answer: Scramble Your Spice Rack

One thing that my mother suggested to me when I first started getting interested in learning to cook beyond blindly following a recipe was that I try making scrambled eggs with one single spice in them to see how that flavor affects the taste of something I know well. It's actually a pretty good way to train your tastebuds to understand what flavor a particular spice imparts. You could then move on to combinations of spices.

For Indian food, however, they're probably using a combination of lots of spices. Garam Masala can be up to 12 different spices, not counting aromatics such as onions and garlic. So you may be better off trying to compare different recipes for that particular dish and seeing what the difference is with those particular spice mixtures.

In general, I'm a big fan of trying different things and seeing if you like them. For example, I can't stand the flavor of black licorice, and so I avoid anise and all variants. However, I wanted to try making a chicken pho which called for star anise. I tried it, and found that in very small amounts, I actually like it. So go and experiment. Try different recipes for the same things, and try modifying your own recipes a bit at a time. Sometimes it may not work, but even then you'll be learning a lot.

Answer: No Shortcuts

I don't think there are any shortcuts to trying the individual spices. If you only want to figure out that Indian dish, you could practice with just the typical range of Indian spices. It is often helpful to close your eyes while tasting and try to really imprint the flavor in your mind, and associate with the name and appearance of the food you are tasting. (I find I have a terrific memory for food and terrible for wine. I think the reason is that wine all looks you know, pretty much the same, so I have nothing visual to hang the flavor memory on.)